The Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™) is a next-generation data center platform that unites computing, networking, storage access, and virtualization resources into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. The system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multichassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain

The Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis is a crucial building block of the Cisco Unified Computing System, delivering a scalable and flexible blade server chassis for today's and tomorrow's data center while helping reduce TCO.

Cisco's first blade server chassis offering, the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis, is six rack units (6RU) high and can mount in an industry-standard 19-inch rack. A chassis can house up to eight half-width Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers and can accommodate both half- and full-width blade form factors.

Four single-phase, hot-swappable power supplies are accessible from the front of the chassis. These power supplies are 92 percent efficient and can be configured to support nonredundant, N+1 redundant, and grid-redundant configurations. The rear of the chassis contains eight hot-swappable fans, four power connectors (one per power supply), and two I/O bays for Cisco UCS 2208XP Fabric Extenders. A passive midplane provides up to 80 Gbps of I/O bandwidth per server slot and up to 160 Gbps of I/O bandwidth for two slots. The chassis is capable of supporting future 40 Gigabit Ethernet standards.

The Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis revolutionizes the use and deployment of blade-based systems. By incorporating unified fabric, integrated, embedded management, and fabric extender technology, Cisco UCS allows the chassis to use fewer physical components, has no need for independent management, and enables greater energy efficiency than traditional blade server chassis. This simplicity eliminates the need for dedicated chassis management and blade switches, reduces cabling, and enables Cisco UCS to scale to 40 chassis without adding complexity. The Cisco UCS 5108 chassis is a critical component in delivering the Cisco UCS benefits of data center simplicity and IT responsiveness.

In addition, the Cisco UCS 5108 chassis has the architectural advantage of not having to power and cool excess switches in each chassis. With a larger power budget per blade server, Cisco can design uncompromised expandability and capabilities in its blade servers, as evidenced by the new Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server, with its leading memory slot and drive capacity, and the Cisco UCS B230 M2 Blade Server, with its industry-leading 32-DIMM memory density in a half-width form factor.